Sunday 1 February 2009

cookbook v0.2: Now with Shopping Lists!

So just four days after I announced v0.1 of cookbook I'm back to blog about the changes and new features that you can now play with in v0.2. So in no particular order we have...
  1. More sensible printing support: If you print any of the pages you will no longer get the common banner and footer on the printed page. I may do more work to change the layout etc. for the printed page so if you have any suggestions you know where the comment form is.
  2. Favourites: You can now mark a recipe as a favourite (click the little heart below the recipe title), and can view a list of your favourite recipes.
  3. Customise how many a recipe serves: You can now change how many people a recipe serves using a drop down list. This updates the ingredients list and the directions so you don't have to calculate the new amounts.
  4. To help with the customizable serves feature I've added a new markup symbol to the recipe editor. Any amount that changes based on the number serving, but that isn't an ingredient, should be surrounded by ~. So for example, "divide the mixture int ~4~ equals amounts".
  5. Shopping List: You can now add recipes to a shopping list which will combine all the ingredients into a single list (for shopping, obviously). This also makes use of the customisable serves feature so when you add the recipe to the shopping list it uses the amounts currently displayed.
  6. Free text search: There is now a search field in the banner which you can use to search over the recipe titles and directions. It currently isn't too accurate due to a feature of the database. Words that appear in over 50% of the records don't appear in the index. So because there is only a small number of recipes searching for chicken returns no results as 4 out of the 7 recipes involve chicken. This feature will improve and become more useful as more recipes are added (hint, hint).
  7. My Account: Currently the "My Account" page is just a place holder but it should soon allow you to update your personal details and customise your home page.
  8. Lots of database changes that are not apparent yet but should make adding the remaining requested features easier -- so watch this space!
  9. All the ways of filtering the recipes (tags, user, free text, and favourites) get displayed using the same page which allows for any combination of filters. This is implemented on the server but I haven't figured out the best way of doing the interface yet (you can play with the URL though and see what happens).
  10. More layout changes, although many of the pages still have only a very basic layout.
Well, I think that is all the changes I have made. As usual let me know what you think and feel free to start adding your own recipes and making use of the site.

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